Posts

I haven’t been to the post office since “the incident.” I was that wild-eyed woman with a screaming child, slowly working my way up the line as one customer after another let me go ahead. Turns out my desperate attempts to comfort my kid were the result of a rookie error. The tantrum came from an oversight I made earlier that day: failing to notice the signals (eye-rubbing and crankiness) that he was tired. No wonder he had a meltdown. Read more →

From infancy to the job market, these common parenting mistakes hurt more than they help

Anyone who’s ever been to a school science fair and seen the elaborate projects that obviously weren’t conceived by a child’s brain knows that parents are more involved than ever. New research shows that some surprisingly common things parents do to help their children succeed might not be doing their kids much good. And according to a new cover story by Hanna Rosin for The Atlantic, the overprotective instincts of modern parents are destroying children’s independence, trapping them in a hyper-controlled bubble that they might never escape. (This behavior is not doing parents much good either; one study indicates that helicopter mothers are more likely to be unhappy.) Read more →